Fort Benning, Georgia – 2011

The temporary euphoria of completing a task that I hoped would serve as a magic wand sort of treatment, banishing all my dark thoughts to the abyss, worked for a while. I finished the rough draft of our exploits in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Redeployment a few months later helped, too. It’s a really great feeling to return to the Land of the Free after a year in the Land of the Sand. I rode that emotional wave until the autumn leaves fell and the nightmares and depression returned. My marriage was washing up, so in a desperate attempt to save what was irretrievably broken—that was on the Petition for Divorce; a rare moment of poetry in the legal system—I called a military hotline to get a counselor.

Operator: Are you contemplating harming yourself?

The woman approached us, advanced upon me, with hands painted red by my will to stay alive.

Me: No…

Operator: Are you contemplating harming someone other than yourself?

Me: Not just right now…

Operator: OK, we’ll try to get you in to see a counselor. It looks like their earliest appointment is six weeks from now.

Me: Ma’am, my marriage will be past the point of return by then. I can’t sleep and I am so, so tired of living like an extra from a zombie apocalypse movie.

Operator: (Not without sympathy) There is a Family Life Center on Fort Benning. They have chaplains on standby that could see you with no waiting…

For a brief second I compiled a mental short-list of individuals to whom I wouldn’t mind threatening bodily harm. Sensing that this would be a poor career move, I agreed and found my way the next morning to the counseling center. It was nested in a dilapidated building that was once a World War II barracks. I signed in on a clip board and sat in a comfortable chair next to a small, plastic Zen fountain. The water burbled at me cheerily and with sanguine assurance until I thought I must surely go mad.

Children in the alley who played at war with unparalleled enthusiasm. See how he dips his head into the lane begging for a baptism in lead.

A few toe-tapping minutes in the silence of the waiting room later, a large, slightly overweight chaplain welcomed me into his office. We exchanged pleasantries as he settled behind his laptop computer and began to build a file on me. “What are your goals for treatment? What do you want to achieve?”

“Let go of the goddam door, Denney! I’m going down there to take that little pecker out! Let go!”

“Well, Sir, my marriage is on the skids, I can’t concentrate, can’t sleep, I’m irritable and constantly depressed. I want that to all go away. I need help and quick.”

The Chaplain observed me for a second over his glasses. “Yeah, we can help you but it won’t be overnight. There’s no magic bullet that will make it go away. You know someone who loses an arm in combat will never get the arm back. They just have to learn to live with their new normal. The best we might be able to do for you is help you learn how to live with it.”

The bullet in a slow motion slalom from wall to wall like a living thing with metal teeth seeking me out; the dull impact.

“Anything is better than where I’m at now.”

He continued to type for a minute longer then came over to a seat across from me with a pad of paper and a pen. “Tell me about your deployment history.”

“Sergeant Bourquin, he’s dead.”

The tall, young man covered with tattoos. Too young to believe that we can die. “No, he’s NOT!”

“I’ve deployed three times. The first was in support of Task Force Hawk during the Kosovo Conflict in 1999. We didn’t see any action then. Most recently I deployed to Balad, Iraq when we turned out the lights and pulled out but that was quiet, too. A rocket landed about a hundred meters away from me, but that was it. Barely raised my pulse. Everything that’s bothering me came from my first deployment to Iraq in 2004. Sadr City was—interesting.”

Swope, the platoon sergeant who spoke so quietly that you thought he was slightly mad and, thus, terrifying. “Red 1, this is Red 4, Charlie one-two and Charlie one-three are mobility kill. I say again, both victors will not roll!”

The pen scribbled. “What was your job then? You were a lieutenant?”

“No, I was enlisted then. A specialist in the infantry. I’m in the Ordnance Corps now. Desk Jockey extraordinaire. Back then I was a rifleman, designated marksman and recorder for the Platoon Leader. We had a lot of interesting missions. On the same patrol we could hand out bread and lead in equal measure.”

The never-ending swarm of Charles Dickens dirt-orphans always quick with a ‘you giff me’ this and ‘shokalata’ that until you wanted to gouge out your own eyes to quiet your heart.

The scribble of pen like rat claws scratching, scratching. “How often would you say you had an experience so traumatic that you try not to think about it?”

“I counted over two hundred and ten combat missions that I participated in over the course of a year. We left the base at least twice a day, sometimes three. Except for Thanksgiving Day. I remember we had that day off. I was shot in the leg, blown up by a mortar, struck by so many improvised explosive devices that it became mundane, hit in the head with rocks. A grenade once landed at my feet and exploded. But everything I’m dealing with today started on the 4th of April.” In that damn street. In that damn alley.

The chaplain put down the pen and began to explain a procedure that he would like to try. It was called ERT which I think he said was Emotional Replacement Therapy or some such. It essentially used eye movement in coordination with sound and vibration while discussing a disturbing event. There was, of course, more to it than that. I had to construct an imaginary safe house that I could go to when I became overwhelmed. I also had to construct an imaginary container for the negative emotions in between visits. It struck me as bunch of New Age hippy crap, but I was at the end of my rope and willing to try everything up to and including coed naked bocci ball if it would work.

And let me tell you something; it worked. It worked like a charm in that the therapy replaced my typically emotionless state with good old-fashioned rage. As I began to recount for the good chaplain the sequence of events up to and including the children used as human shields, I felt the anger begin to well to the surface. On and on I went, my voice shaking, my heart pounding as I begin to tell about how I got shot.